Special | 5m 42s | Video has closed captioning.
Programming plays a huge role in the world that surrounds us, and though its uses are often purely functional, there is a growing community of artists who use the language of code as their medium. Their work includes everything from computer generated art to elaborate interactive installations, all with the goal of expanding our sense of what is possible with digital tools.
Aired: 01/03/13
From:
JONATHAN MINARD: Creative coding translates the world of computers and code to everyday experience.
JAMES GEORGE: They're not setting out to solve a problem.
They're setting out to express themselves.
DANIEL SHIFFMAN: And there is this really active, energetic community of people who make libraries, who write tutorials, who teach with it.
KEITH BUTTERS: You can write words.
You can do photography.
You can dance.
Why not also write code?
[music playing] DANIEL SHIFFMAN: If you're gonna program in C++ or you're doing stuff for the web in JavaScript, you've got to kind of piece together a lot of different elements.
And processing will let you just get started on day one immediately.
There isn't this need for formal computer science rigor, where you have to understand how every little bit of code line works.
It's fine to just try to learn about how things work through doing.
I think for the most part it's used for computational design.
So a lot of visual artists and designers who want to create something visual but don't want to make it manually-- which could mean they don't want to draw it-- it's something that needs to be generated by an algorithm or a process-- that's something you can do with processing.
People do so much stuff with it.
We can use processing to put content on a 120-foot wide video wall.
People use it to make prints, physical things.
It's used to make clothing.
You can make data visualizations with it.
This is a starting point and it is a conversation and it is a way of introducing this realization that the computer isn't just a tool that has a set of possibilities that you have been given.
You know, as systems and systems get more and more closed, the more that we can actually understand how to write our own software, that is really a way one can express themselves and sort of break the bounds and limitations of what larger institutions and corporations have made available to us to do on our computers.
And so it can really open one's eyes to things that you weren't aware of.
KEITH BUTTERS: We started developing a couple of projects way back in the mid-2000s.
One turned into the iTunes Visualizer for Apple.
We took all of the code that was created, refactored it, and started sort of the base layer of what later grew into Cinder.
Cinder is a library of code written in C++ that allows creative people to not have to do the boring stuff and focus actually on creativity and making the art side of things.
We really focus on high-level professorial people who are doing this for their job.
Cinder's been used in a lot of big-scale and small-scale projects.
For example, the Nike FuelBand wall was done in Cinder.
That was at South by Southwest.
Mill produced something called Mill Touch, where you could navigate through their portfolio.
You could scrub video with your hands.
Cinder is open source for a few reasons.
One of which is that my company-- Barbarian Group-- benefits greatly from other open source projects.
And so there's this desire and need to give back.
Another reason for it to be open source is that we benefit greatly from other users who help write the library and grow the library to where it needs to be.
You know, some people write, some people paint.
There are some people who can basically think in visual code and do some of the most beautiful things you've ever seen.
JONATHAN MINARD: openFrameworks is a really powerful environment for creative coding.
It's borrowing from libraries developed by a community.
JAMES GEORGE: We decided to use openFrameworks Frameworks because it enables us to kind of explore these new possibilities.
JONATHAN MINARD: Both of us coming from a video background, we're really interested in using the Connect as a camera and exploring its potential for new forms of cinema.
JAMES GEORGE: So that was the birth of the RGBD Toolkit.
JONATHAN MINARD: We're working with traditional DSLR video cameras and combining that with the Connect that perceives the world in three dimensions.
JAMES GEORGE: What is the aesthetic of right now?
I think a lot of people are sort of seeing themselves as avatars being represented by digital systems, kind of living in digital worlds.
And for me it's really interesting conceptually for us to kind of create a way for people to look at themselves through these lenses.
JONATHAN MINARD: Now we're really interested in bringing this into a different domain, letting people experience that footage real time so that you're engaging with the content.
It's not necessarily the future of cinema, but it's a future.
JAMES GEORGE: We didn't feel that we were capable of exploring that ourselves, and so we decided to use openFrameworks because it's based on the philosophy of sharing.
They create their artwork and then also give back the things that they learned and the new tools they created so that other artists can use that.
JONATHAN MINARD: Creative coding is really distinct from previous art movements in the sense that they are all sharing the bits and pieces that underlie these artworks that they produce.
JAMES GEORGE: Extending from that philosophy, the Toolkit then, we released that software open source to present it as something that filmmakers could explore and try new things with it.
JONATHAN MINARD: I think that we're seeing the emergence of a new kind of creativity, one that's highly interconnected and necessarily so.
DANIEL SHIFFMAN: What the future is is kind of up to the community.
It's up to the people who choose to volunteer, who make libraries.
JAMES GEORGE: Now we actually have companies coming to the openFrameworks community before they release a product, saying, surprise us with this.
Let us know what you think we want to do with this.
JONATHAN MINARD: It shows how artists are using technology in new ways to actually influence future commercial products.
KEITH BUTTERS: I think the community is really supportive, but also competitive at the same time.
So it's of pushing everything forward.
[music playing]
